So since this question was asked of me too...
I still remember the evening I discovered ML...Halloween 2004. I was looking for a new game to play, and it seemed to fit what I wanted...it was small and not intimidating, but at the same time there seemed to be so much to do, and so much potential...that potential alone would keep me involved with it for almost eight years. Over the first few weeks, I got to know the many awesome people that were in the community, and within a month I had become a co-leader of the largest guild in the game, The Guardians, which Evelyn was a part of as well. We were sort of an uberguild...we owned at least half the guild halls (large houses you could buy with huge amounts of gold) and had at least half the players. It's odd...all the time I spent with that game, and it's the first two months that I remember as the funnest.
Shortly after that, the owner decided to make it so that people could create their own game servers instead of there just being one official server, and in hindsight that's where the problems started. At the time it was a decision I supported...to say that the owner was aloof is putting it kindly. He did little actual content development on his own, and he seemed to have no ability to keep a decent relationship with those that volunteered to do it for him. As Evelyn mentioned, he even tried to put one of his content admins on trial in the game and threatened to call his employer over some ultimately minor thing. But it created a bigger problem long-term...it created too many cooks...too many people that had different ideas of how the game should run and had the power to implement them. Sometimes there four or five servers for a playerbase of 15 to 20 players max. Running a server became more the game than the actual game.
During that time I was involved with a number of servers...our guild, The Guardians, got behind the first one called LoG Legends. Despite our inexperience with coding or designing a game, I think it was the most quaint of the servers we did...it was something we were having fun with, and we were a bit indulgent...each staff member had their own office which connected to a central meeting map for staff members to discuss things. I don't remember why it ended...I think the server host could no longer be bothered to be involved cause he'd become a huge stoner at that point. Then I was a staff member on another server called Mystera Realms that never saw the light of day...finally I led my first server, ML: Classic, which was an effort to recreate the previous official server with minimum changes.
That's the point that I should have left...I think this was late 2007. In three years there hadn't been much in the way of stable, long-running servers, and people were beginning to lose interest. Instead I ended up merging my server with the server of another group that I had never gotten along with...in fact they were our guild's rivals back in the day. We reasoned that if we created one server that was stable and could draw enough players, it would revitalize the game and bring it back to its old glory. On paper it was a good idea, but in practice it was never what it should've been...it was a very one-sided merger, there was a lot of drama, and ultimately the server came to an end when the host and her boyfriend (who was also on staff) broke up. I was the target of many attacks, from deciding to do this to begin with to a lot of other things, and it was just a bad experience.
I took a six-month break after that, but did come back...in my absence the owner had put up a new official server, but of course he wasn't doing anything with it and most players were gone at this point, but I did meet up with my old friend that hosted my first server...he'd cleaned up his act...and another person, and we decided to give it another try, starting a new server called Neo. The first instance lasted six months and ended when Evelyn became *owner* of the game and axed it in favour of her own official server project. The second instance was after she decided she was done with it and gave the source code of the game to me, which made me *owner* for awhile. I say *owner* because during this time ownership was pretty fluid and ultimately it went back to the original owner anyway, but this allowed us to not just make a server, but to create our own custom client and server and make a lot of improvements that hadn't been possible before. But...there were problems...again, too many cooks. As owner, I wanted to strive to make the project more professional, such as requiring that new areas had outlines of the purposes they'd serve for example, but we had some staff members that just wanted to do whatever the hell they wanted. We seriously had someone that created hundreds of maps of one area that had absolutely no purpose...at the same time some people had developed a personal vendetta against me for various reasons over the years, and ultimately things came to a head and continuing to run it was not viable anymore...so, I left for good. I had taken this game on as something of a personal responsibility over the years, even though it had stopped being fun years before...and I'd just finally learned that it wasn't worth it to keep putting up with shit if it was no longer fun.
An official server for the game still runs, but as far as I know hardly nobody plays it...the potential dried up long-ago, and I don't think there's anybody involved that wasn't there ten years ago...it's basically running off the fumes of nostalgia. This has been a very long summary...it honestly doesn't do justice to the years of different events, emotions, drama, ups, downs, and everything else...I was 18 when I started playing, and 26 when I finally left...it's a huge portion of my life, and I put so much of myself into that for so long...but, I suppose it set the stage for better things here in NS. Without the lessons I learned there, perhaps I would not have been able to put together a successful region like this one.
